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Shane Snow, co-founder and Chief Creative Officer of Contently just published[http://www.harpercollins.com/9780062302458/smartcuts Smartcuts: How Hackers, Innovators, and Icons Accelerate Success”] about which contemporary and historical businesses and practitioners are the real winners and why they are able to succeed more rapidly than any of their competitors. Snow didn’t want to just write about these leaders, but apply their lessons to his day job — as Chief Creative Officer of the SaaS media company he co-founded,Contently. In a recent email interview, Snow explained how his research is used by Contently.' ' First movers and failure. 'Snow describes how the concept was falsely established that a first mover in a market or product space has a persistent advantage, and what the research really shows: that first movers had a 47% failure rate and that “companies that took control of a product’s market share after the first movers pioneered them – had only an 8% failure rate.” He explains, “Like early pioneers crossing the American plains, first movers have to create their own wagon trails, but later movers can follow in the ruts.” Contently was very early in the SaaS of creating content, so is that troubling? “Though we’ve been the first to market with our particular solution, we like to let other companies warm things up for us when possible, of course. We’re really riding the second wave of our industry in some sense—custom publishing companies have been around for a long time, and that’s the primary industry we’re eating right now. But it is a challenge when you create something fresh that others will soon be nipping at your heels, and you just wrote a book about how first-movers only win 9% of the time! Our opportunity is to reinvent ourselves faster than someone else can reinvent us. To ride the second wave past our previous version of ourselves, if that makes sense. “Peter Thielof PayPal recently wrote about how great businesses have no competitors, and I’m jealous of anyone who’s in that situation. But the reality is that good opportunities breed competition like flies. There are tons of companies in our space now that it’s shown to be lucrative.” '''Radical Simplicity. '''Snow admires companies that can take simplicity seriously and can strip out what is unnecessary in order to “zero in on what matters.” ' '''So when it comes to Contently, '''what have the co-founders said no to, in order to simplify their business model? “We’ve said ‘no’ so far to lots of complicated pricing models, like per-seat pricing. But mostly we say no to product features that people want us to build. We’d rather be AppleAAPL -0.66% than Windows Vista. What makes Apple great is what they have the fortitude to cut out: buttons, features, frivolous details. We often have long debates about how to cut nice—but not essential—stuff from our product offerings. Those are hard conversations, especially when you’re serving enterprise customers with lots of wants and you need to teach them that they can accomplish what they need in a simpler way. “We have often opted to ‘plug in’ or ‘partner’ with other great, single-use products (like Sprinklr or Percolate for social, rather than building our own social tools, or WordPress for publishing) when there are superfluous features that we don’t want to clutter our app with. We want to be the best environment there is for collaborating and creating rich, long-form stories. We’ll help you figure out what to do with it, but often that’s in plugging in somewhere else. Apple doesn’t provide your Internet connection and electricity.”